Nor did he look for the smaller man, though he knew that Ernchester, like himself, would be getting on at the last moment.
He knew it would not be possible to see him.
Eight years ago, toward the end of the South African war, James Asher had stayed with a Boer family on the outskirts of Pretoria. Though they were, like many Boers, sending information to the Germans, they were good people at heart, believing that what they did helped their country's cause-they had welcomed him into their home under the impression he was a harmless professor of linguistics at Heidelberg, in Africa to study Bantu pidgins."We are not savages," Mrs. van der Platz had said. "Just because a man cannot produce documents for this thing and that thing does not mean he is a spy."
Of course, Asher had been a spy. And when Jan van der Platz-sixteen and Asher's loyal shadow for weeks-had learned that Asher was not German but English and had confronted him in tears, Asher had shot him to protect his contacts in the town, the Kaffirs who slipped him information and would be horribly killed in retaliation, and the British troops in the field who would have been massacred by the commandos had he been forced to talk. Asher had returned to London, resigned his position with the Foreign Office, and married, to her family's utter horror, the eighteen-year-old girl whose heart he never thought he had the smallest hope of winning.
At the time, he thought he would never exert himself for King and Country again.
And here he was, bound for Paris with the rain pounding hollowly on the roof of the second-class carriage and only a few pounds in his pocket, because he had seen Ignace Karolyi, of the Austrian Kundschafts Stelle, talking to a man who could not be permitted to take Austrian pay.
It was a possibility Asher had lived with, and feared, for a year, since first he had learned who and what Charles Farren and those like him were.
Making his way down the corridor from car to car, Asher glimpsed Karolyi through a window in first class, reading a newspaper in an otherwise empty compartment. The Dorian Gray beauty of his features hadn't changed in the thirteen years since Asher had last seen him. Though Karolyi must be nearly forty now, not a trace of silver showed in the smooth black hair or the pen trace of mustache on the short upper lip; not a line marred the corners of those childishly wide-set dark eyes.
"My blood leaps at the thought of obeying whatever command the Emperor may give me." Asher remembered him springing to his feet in the soft bright haze of the gaslit Cafe Versailles on the Graben, the bullion glittering on the scarlet of his Guards uniform; remembered the shine of idealistic idiocy in his upturned face. "I will fight upon whatever battlefield He may direct." One could hear the capital letter in he-the Emperor- and around him, his fellow beau sabreurs of the Imperial Life Guards had roared and applauded, though they'd roared louder when another of their number had joked, "Yes, of course, Igni... but who's going to point you in the direction of the enemy?"
Even when Karolyi had hunted Asher with dogs through the Dinaric Alps after torturing to death his local contact and guide-when it was blindingly obvious that his pose as a brainless young nobleman who spent most of his time waltzing at society balls rather than drilling with his regiment was a sham-that was still the Karolyi Asher remembered.
They'd never met face-to-face in that hellish week of hide-and-seek among the streams and gorges, and Asher didn't know if Karolyi was aware who his quarry had been. But passing along the corridor now with barely a glance through the window, he remembered the body of the guide, and was disinclined to take chances.
In any case, it was not Karolyi whom he feared most.
The third-class carriage was noisier than second, crowded and smelling of unwashed wool and dirty linen. A child cried on and on like the shriek of a factory whistle. Unshaven men looked up from Le Figaro or the Illustrated London News as Asher walked between the hard, high-backed benches. Yellow electric light jittered over cheap felt hats, wet paper flowers, plain steel pins; a woman said, "Hush now, Beatrice, hush," in a voice that held no hope of Beatrice hushing this side of the Gare du Nord.
Asher kept his collar turned up, knowing Farren would recognize him. It unnerved him to realize that the man might be in this carriage and he would never so much as catch a glimpse of him. He didn't like to think about what would happen to him in that case.
At the far end of the third-class car was a baggage compartment, given over to bicycles and crated dogs and an enormous canework bath chair. It was unlighted, and through its windows Asher could see the rain flashing like diamonds in the dirty light shining from third class. As Asher stepped through and closed the door, the cold struck him-all the windows had been opened, rattling noisily in their frames, wet flecks of water spattering through.
At his feet a dog in a cage whined with fear.
The smell of the rainy night could neither cover nor disperse the stink of death.
Asher looked around him quickly, kneeling so as to be out of the line of the window. Dim light came through the little judas on the door, but not enough; he fumbled a lucifer match from the box in his greatcoat pocket, scratched it with his nail.
The man's body had been folded small, knees mashed into chest, arms bent close to sides, the whole skinny tangle of him shoved tight into a corner behind a double bass in a case.
Asher blew out the match, lit another, and crouched to worm close. The dead man was young, dark, unshaven, with a laborer's callused hands and a roughly knotted kerchief around his neck instead of a cravat. His clothing smelled of cheap gin and cheaper tobacco. One of his shoes was worn through. Only a little blood had soaked into the neckerchief, though when Asher moved it down with one finger, he saw that the jugular vein had been cut clear through, a rough, ripping tear, the edges white and puffy, mangled as if they had been chewed and sucked. Asher had a scar that size where his collar pressed the silver links of the necklace against his skin.
A third match showed the dead man's face utterly white, blue-lipped, eyebrows and beard stubble glaring, though by the appearance of the eyelids he'd been dead for less than thirty minutes. Moving a frayed pants cuff, Asher saw the bare ankle had not yet begun to turn livid. Probably, Asher thought with a queer, angry coldness, it never would, much.
He blew out the match, stowed the stub-with the stubs of the first two-in his pocket, and slithered from between the bath chair and bass fiddle case. He'd passed the conductor in the second-class carriage, on his way down the train. The official's nearness had probably interrupted the murderer before he could dump the body out into the night, or perhaps Ernchester was waiting till they were farther from London. Asher left the compartment quickly, dusting his hands on his coat skirts and muttering to himself like a man who has not found what he sought. Nobody in third class gave him a glance.
By the time the train reached Dover, he suspected, the body would be gone. To call attention now to what he had found would only, inevitably, call attention to himself. He wasn't such a fool as to think he would then ever reach Paris alive.
In the dingy second-class compartment where he had left his satchel, a lively family of homebound Parisians had made themselves very much at home. They were passing bread and cheese among themselves; the bonne femme offered him some and a blood orange, while her mari laboriously scanned a battered copy of I'Aurore. Asher thanked her and fished out his own copy of the Times, most of which he had already read on the journey up from Tunbridge Wells, and wondered academically what he was going to tell whoever was in charge of the Paris section these days. It was going to be a long night, he knew. He dared not sleep, lest Farren sense him through his dreams.